After John le Carré's death, his son had the 'daunting' task to revive George Smiley

When acclaimed British novelist John le Carré died in 2020, he left behind a literary legacy — and a mission for his family. Le Carré's son, author Nick Harkaway, describes it as "an obligation to try to keep the books read, to keep the name alive, but, more than anything else, to keep the books in circulation."

The family agreed that the best way to honor le Carré would be with another book featuring his most beloved character, British spymaster George Smiley. Harkaway had a list of people in mind who could continue Smiley's story — then his brother suggested that Harkaway write the novel himself.

Though he'd already published several of his own novels, Harkaway says he had "firm reasons" why he didn't want to take on the task. But, he adds, "in that moment, all the reasons why I wouldn't — it's incredibly challenging. It's this extraordinary piece of 20th-century literary history, it’s this, it’s that — all these things became the reasons why I would."

Harkaway's latest novel, Karla's Choice, takes place in 1963, the time between le Carré's novels The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. In the new book, a retired Smiley is called back into service to conduct one simple interview — which leads to much more than he bargained for. The novel also serves as the origin story of Smiley's nemesis in the KGB, known only as Karla.

Harkaway says reviving his father's characters amounted to a literary apprenticeship, of sorts: "I learned writing from him by osmosis, but we never really talked about writing very much," he explains. "And so the idea of sitting down and holding the controls of the machine and operating it the way he did and working with those characters was a way to learn, which I wanted."

Interview highlights

On his father sharing his process on the Smiley books

I was born in 1972, and I grew up with my dad reading his work. ... He'd write in the early morning and then come to the breakfast table, read them across the table to my mother. Sometimes she'd type them up, and then he'd be reading them again in the afternoon from the typescript, or he'd be working on the typescript the following morning. And incidentally, I love this: They used to use scissors and a stapler; that was cut and paste, because we were pre-digital word processing. In the fundamental years where I was developing language at all, an hour, two hours of my day consisted of hearing the George Smiley novels being written.

On whether he felt his father’s spirit while writing

I hoped in the inevitable kind of corny movie sequence way that when I wrote this book, I would sort of look up from my desk and see him sitting in the chair by the window, maybe with a kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi vibe: “Remember the semicolon.” And of course, I didn't. And I'm not sure I even really hoped it. It just would have felt kind of movie appropriate. But what I got instead was the companionship of occupying the space that he occupied: The business of standing and holding the levers of the Smiley machine and moving them around. And there is a kind of unity that I get from that which is incredibly emotionally powerful. And some days, it's actually kind of too emotionally powerful. You have to kind of tamp it down. But I'm not haunted by him, even in the most benign sense. I grieve occasionally. That doesn't go away. It just gets manageable.

On growing up with a celebrity writer father

I don't know what it was like to be anybody else's kid. For most of my life, I have imagined that because my mother made a huge effort to keep our lives somewhat down to earth in various ways and was very successful in that, that my life was sort of mostly like everybody else's. … And the more I look at it now from a distance, the more I realize that's nonsense on an epic scale.

My life was very odd by any reasonable standard. … When I was little, we lived in a house on the Cornish cliff. Our nearest neighbor was a mile away. … I spent my time walking up and down the coastal path with a dog by myself at the age of 6. I was a little bit feral. … And then every so often the house would fill up with people and those people would be in some way important that I didn't properly understand. And they would be publishers and they would be foreign correspondents and journalists, and some of them would be politicians, and some of them would have no defined profession. And they were fascinating.

On picking his own pen name, Nick Harkaway

I knew from my father's life that having a pseudonym is a really useful shield. If somebody wants to yell at Nick Harkaway, they can really do it as much as they like. In the end, however much it upsets me, it doesn't get to me, you know. But when somebody comes for you in your real name, that's a different experience. ... 

The story about my dad choosing his own pseudonym is that he was told he should have a solid, two-monosyllables, good English name. And he was so irritated by this advice that he chose to make up a French name instead. So when I decided I wanted a name, I went to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and I literally let it flop open and stuck pins in the words. And I had a list of 20 absolutely stupid names and Harkaway was the last one.

 On writing more in his father’s style

The first thing is my father's style isn’t constant across his writing. Of course it's not, because it's a huge career. But with the Smiley books particularly, ... the first three … [have] short sentences, quite declarative. They're almost noir-ish. They have quite simple plot lines. And they obey this dictum that he ... liked to trot out from civil service telegrams and civil service reports: 400 words, no adjectives. They're very clear and stark. And then by the time you get to Tinker, Tailor, you've had a couple of books in between. You have a different ethos at work. The language is much more roving, much more illusory. The book is more complex, the structures are more complex, and it's more poetic.

On why George Smiley is physically unremarkable, almost dull 

In the U.K., you had James Bond, you had Bulldog Drummond, you had these very much action-hero-type spy stories. And [le Carré's] experience was not that. It wasn't these sort of incredibly energetic, combat-oriented people, sort of flawless heroes. It was ordinary people doing a hard, endless, possibly slightly futile thing and banging up against their own flaws. And he wanted to show the humanity. Showing the humanity so that you can understand it and feel compassion about it is a big part of everything he wrote.

Smiley is, in many ways, the epitome of that. He's just this guy. And yet, at the same time, of course, he's this tremendously intelligent reasoner and he's empathic and he understands people before they understand themselves. So you have, on the one hand, a character who's an everyman in a world that feels appropriately run down to the universe we know. And on the other, you have a kind of Sherlock Holmes character who can explain to you the impossibly complex, stupid, brutal realities of the world that you see around you and tell you why they are that way and even control them a little bit to make them less so. It's that combination which I think makes him incredibly appealing.

Therese Madden and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.